"Change" That Has Already Failed

Monday, June 30th, 2008 at
12:46 pm

As the promise of Universal Healthcare continues to be sold to the American public by Democrats, the anecdotes fly. Look here; a case failure of our healthcare system! Look there; another person falls through the cracks!

The problem is, it’s the big picture that continues to put the lie to the selling of socialized medicine. As I’ve noted before, the system in Oregon will deny cancer patients life-saving or -extending medicine, but will gladly pay for life-ending “treatment”. You can decry all you want the profit motive of the private enterprise system, but with socialized medicine the profit motive is just as motivating, with a bigger bureaucracy larger than any insurance company you can name calling the shots.

And as Christians, is this the kind of system that we want to be encouraging? We’d have rationed healthcare (all socialized systems wind up here, sooner or later), equally poor quality, and a respect for life on par with Oregon’s.

But hey, it would be “equal”. Wonderful.

This bit of “hope” and “change”, however, has already been done on this scale. And how has it worked? Let’s talk to one of the founding fathers.

Back in the 1960s, [Claude] Castonguay chaired a Canadian government committee studying health reform and recommended that his home province of Quebec — then the largest and most affluent in the country — adopt government-administered health care, covering all citizens through tax levies.

The government followed his advice, leading to his modern-day moniker: “the father of Quebec medicare.” Even this title seems modest; Castonguay’s work triggered a domino effect across the country, until eventually his ideas were implemented from coast to coast.

Four decades later, as the chairman of a government committee reviewing Quebec health care this year, Castonguay concluded that the system is in “crisis.”

“We thought we could resolve the system’s problems by rationing services or injecting massive amounts of new money into it,” says Castonguay. But now he prescribes a radical overhaul: “We are proposing to give a greater role to the private sector so that people can exercise freedom of choice.”

Hear that? In Canada, freedom of choice is “radical”. Private sector healthcare is the cure for socialized medicine, not the disease that requires it. The change Democrats are hoping for would ruin healthcare in this country. How bad is it in Canada?

What would drive a man like Castonguay to reconsider his long-held beliefs? Try a health care system so overburdened that hundreds of thousands in need of medical attention wait for care, any care; a system where people in towns like Norwalk, Ontario, participate in lotteries to win appointments with the local family doctor.

Years ago, Canadians touted their health care system as the best in the world; today, Canadian health care stands in ruinous shape.

It was touted as “best in the world” by people blinded by this utopian, socialist vision. It was an economic disaster in the making from the get-go; they just didn’t want to be bothered by the reality of the details. And now, as the article notes, the Canadian government even sends people to the US to ease their issues with overload and shortages.

And Canada isn’t alone.

Canada isn’t the only country facing a government health care crisis. Britain’s system, once the postwar inspiration for many Western countries, is similarly plagued. Both countries trail the U.S. in five-year cancer survival rates, transplantation outcomes and other measures.

And yet, Democrats insist on not learning from the past.

“I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer health care program,” Obama said back in the 1990s. Last year, Obama told the New Yorker that “if you’re starting from scratch, then a single-payer system probably makes sense.”

When Obama seemed to waver from this position, Hillary Clinton let him have it. A Democratic president and Democratic Congress would no doubt try to foist this sort of disaster on us.

And yes, I’m gong to play the religion card; as a Christian, a system which denies healthcare for people but will pay for their demise is specifically immoral on its face. Ours isn’t perfect, but compared to those that Democrats tout, it’s light-years ahead. You’ll always have anecdotes of failure, but the overall system has to be judged, and that where socialism, in medicine or elsewhere, fails.

4 Comments

Perhaps you can help me understand your position, as healthcare is not an area in which I have a great deal of knowledge. It sounds like you’re decrying Obama’s approach as “socialized medicine,” when I don’t believe that to be the case. It wouldn’t be a matter of gov’t running the hospitals or doctors or insurance companies, these are all still private enterprises that will continue to provide health care, as I understand Obama’s plan.

…”Lewin estimates the proposal would cover 99.6 percent of all Americans without raising
total national health spending. It would also save hundreds of billions over time – more
than $1 trillion over the next 10 years – in national health spending, according to Lewin.”

SAVE money, serve effectively everyone.

2. As this approach (which I believe is the approach on which Obama has based his policy) makes use of private insurance/doctors/hospitals (NOT gov’t-run operations), how is this “socialized” healthcare? It is funded by gov’t AND by employers, but not RUN by gov’t.

That strikes me as a tweaking of a capitalist approach to healthcare, not the much feared “socialist” healthcare as it is often described.

Where is this report mistaken? It seems as though it would SAVE us money, not cost.

Like I said, I’ve seen anecdotal reports of Canada’s and UK’s system being great, I’ve seen reports of the opposite nature. If you’re merely offering more opinion of the nature, “Here’s some people who don’t like Canada’s plan…” that probably won’t be especially helpful.

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